4K TV's

[Rob]

Anyone have one? 

What do you have?

Pros and cons of that model?

I'm thinking about buying one, I'm leaning towards the Sony X930e and while I've been reading a lot, I don't have a lot of recommendations from people who I KNOW don't have an agenda.

So I'm curious.

[Phrubruh]

If you buy a 4K make sure to pick up a PS4 Pro or XBox One X for some amazing eye candy games.

[Nicklab]

I can't offer much in the way of advice on hardware.  I don't tend to keep up on what's hot in terms of consumer electronics.

But from my vantage point as a professional in broadcasting?  4K is still in it's infancy.  It's fantastic purely from a resolution standpoint.  But the majority of broadcasters aren't equipped to handle a lot of 4K content right now.  I've been shocked to learn that some of the major networks broadcast in a 720 HD format, and not 1080i.  When some broadcasters do offer 4K?  It's usually for a special event, and not for their full schedule.

One exception in terms of content seems to be Netflix.  They're producing some content for their customers to view in 4K.  The made a big point about producing 'House of Cards' in 4K, but then that show has other problems.  And there's also a good amount of home entertainment content in 4K.  But most of the broadcasters aren't there yet.  Part of it is bandwidth and delivery of signal to the customer.  And part of it is hardware.

Just like with any other new tech, wait a little while and the prices will come down significantly.

[BillCable]

https://www.cnet.com/topics/tvs/best-tvs/best-4k-tvs/

For broadcast, 4K is basically useless.  But if you get a 4K Blu-ray player or PS4 Pro you can get a ton of use out of them.  A buddy of mine just installed one, and the 4K Blu-ray of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was just ridiculous.  You can't see pixels standing a foot from the screen.

It's basically a future-proof purchase.  And given that a 65" 4K TV costs half what I paid for a 42" 1080P TV 10 years ago, it's a heck of a good value.

[Rob]

If you buy a 4K make sure to pick up a PS4 Pro or XBox One X for some amazing eye candy games.

I bought an Xbox One X.  That's why I'm shopping 4k TV's.

For broadcast, I've got DTV, and I'm not going to buy a 4K Package from them any time soon.  My only concern is that the TV upscale decently so HD content doesn't look like crap on it.  The guy at Best Buy tells me that won't be a problem, but if any of you have an HD broadcast package piping into a 4K TV, I'd love to know what you found.

For budget, I'm looking to stay under $1000, so I'm not shopping OLED or QLED at the moment.  This one's just for the bedroom so I'm only looking at 49' models.  When we buy a place in the next year or two, then I'll probably shop for a OLED in a larger size as well.

Here's the Sony I'm eyeing, the reviews seem solid and the one at the store looked great.  Also it claims that it'll be Dolby compatible with a firmware update, which is great.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N284JCN/

[Nicklab]

I shudder to think what a Fox NFL game shot in 720p would look like upscaled to 4K.

[Rob]

I shudder to think what a Fox NFL game shot in 720p would look like upscaled to 4K.

With the smaller pixels, shouldn't it more or less look like a 720 broadcast?  I'm not getting an 80 inch TV here... I admittedly don't know the nuts and bolts of upscalers, and I'm sure I'm simplying this, but if 4K TV is basically 4X HD, shouldn't the pixels in any given 2x2 section just mirror each other?  And if they're so much smaller, shouldn't they basically just create one regular HD-sized pixel when they do?

[Nicklab]

Most of what I work on is 1080i.  We occasionally do some 1080p for special projects.  But we had a significant period where our plant was transitioning from SD to HD.  And when you would upconvert some of those SD sources to HD the increased resolution was not kind to the native format.  The defects of that 480i image in 1080i looked bad.  But then that was SD NTSC video, which was an aged format.

With 4K you have 4 times the resolution of a 1080 image.  The benefits of upscaling HD to 4K is that you're starting with a higher resolution source than we did when we made the SD to HD conversion.  But 4K would have around 5 times the resolution of that 720 source.  I'm not sure how happy anyone would be with that image until you saw it.

All of that being said, again, broadcast isn't ready for 4K.  But gaming, streaming and home video content are.

[Dave]

My video tech skills are weak (I'm an old man).  Can standard Blu-Ray even output 4K resolution, or is it 1080?

I'm curious if you can tell a big difference between a 4k monitor and a 1080 monitor.  Is there any normal media that is at 4k?

[BillCable]

Most major releases to Blu-ray now come out on in both standard 1080p Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray...

https://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Galaxy-Vol-2-Blu-ray/dp/B073LF8C4K/
https://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Galaxy-Vol-2-Blu-ray/dp/B06ZXWR8C5/

A standard Blu-ray cannot output 4K, and can't play 4K Blu-rays at all.  But a 4K player will play and upscale 1080p Blu-rays.

[Rob]

Most of what I work on is 1080i.  We occasionally do some 1080p for special projects.  But we had a significant period where our plant was transitioning from SD to HD.  And when you would upconvert some of those SD sources to HD the increased resolution was not kind to the native format.  The defects of that 480i image in 1080i looked bad.  But then that was SD NTSC video, which was an aged format.

With 4K you have 4 times the resolution of a 1080 image.  The benefits of upscaling HD to 4K is that you're starting with a higher resolution source than we did when we made the SD to HD conversion.  But 4K would have around 5 times the resolution of that 720 source.  I'm not sure how happy anyone would be with that image until you saw it.

All of that being said, again, broadcast isn't ready for 4K.  But gaming, streaming and home video content are.

Yeah, I get all that.  I'm an art director / animator / compositor and we make content for HD and 4K... sure the 720 source has further to go, but in theory my point is that 720p on a 4K TV that properly upscales shouldn't look worse than 720p content does on a regular 1080p television - because those pixels are smaller...

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.  I just keep reading that if your 4K set is properly set up, HD broadcast should look solid on it.